With water quality guidelines compelling more farmers to act on nitrogen loss, cover crops and split nitrogen applications are becoming more common in the Midwest. But new University of Illinois research shows these conservation practices may not provide environmental benefits across the board.
“As researchers, we tend to look at one type of pollution at a time. Ours is one of the first studies to evaluate the nitrogen cycle more holistically. Conservation practices relating to water quality have gained a lot of attention lately, but it’s also important to know how they might affect emissions of nitrous oxide, an important greenhouse gas contributing to climate change,” says Giovani Preza-Fontes, who worked on the study as a doctoral student in the Department of Crop Sciences at U of I. Preza-Fontes is now a postdoctoral researcher at Purdue University.
As greenhouse gases go, nitrous oxide is a doozy. With a potency 298 times that of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide is released when soil microbes metabolize nitrogen, an essential nutrient required to grow corn. When soils warm up in the spring and summer, microbes get to work on any nitrogen not taken up by crops, turning a portion into the powerful greenhouse gas.
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